Friday, May 12, 2017

John Thrasher was elected FSU BOT chair about two months
after he admitted to an ethics violation

Back in July of 2001, the Florida Times-Unionreported that former
Florida House of Representatives Speaker John Thrasher “admitted breaking
ethics laws forbidding former legislators from lobbying lawmakers within two
years of leaving office. He has agreed to pay a $500 fine.”

“Sure I regret it, but it was not an intentional violation,”
Thrasher said in a quote published by the newspaper.

Thursday, December 01, 2016

Many supporters of former FAMU President Elmira Mangum
didn’t want to talk about her poor treatment of the university faculty or the
millions FAMU lost due to her enrollment decline. But full coverage of those
issues was available here on Rattler Nation.

Jackson speaks out about Mangum
administration’s treatment of FAMU faculty

One of the top viewed stories of all Rattler Nation’s posts on Mangum
was the one that included the full text of the open letter written by School of Business and Industry
Professor Annette Singleton Jackson.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Florida A&M University saw years of progress roll
backwards during the presidency of Elmira Mangum (2014-2016). Here are some of
the stories you read here first on Rattler Nation before they hit the state and
national headlines:

FAMU loses budget control of FAMU-FSU College of Engineering after 28 years

FSU President John Thrasher used Mangum to help him put an end to FAMU’s budget control at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
(COE). His effort was boosted by Mangum's failure to understand the fact that FAMU
had been in charge of the money for 28 years.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Brandon Johnson, “interim” president of the FAMU Student
Senate, was at the front-and-center of a series of weak efforts to encourage
students to oppose the planned ouster of President Elmira Mangum. His call for
students to join protests against the proposed exit agreement for Mangum
received little support. Only about 20 students stayed the night during a
sleep-in he led outside the Grand Ballroom on Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time Johnson has fallen flat in trying
to get FAMU students to back him. Most FAMU students weren’t in agreement when
he joined Kyle Washington’s personally-driven impeachment campaign against
then-Student Government Association (SGA) President Tonnette Graham.

Graham was the first black woman to win reelection to the
SGA presidency and the first black woman to represent the Florida Student
Association on the Florida Board of Governors.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

The inaccurate information that former FAMU Interim
President Castell Bryant spread about a cohort of National Achievement Scholars
and Semifinalists that came to the university in 1997 just won’t go away. It’s now become a topic
of discussion in the unofficial “FAMU Alumni” page on Facebook.

“I think Dr. [Frederick S. Humphries] is probably one of the most effective
recruiters I have ever known. And the fact that he was able to recruit all
those black national merit scholars to FAMU is actually phenomenal,” Castell
said in a 2007 interview with the St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell. “During some semesters,
he recruited more black merit scholars than Harvard. The sad part is that most
of the students did not graduate from FAMU. In fact, at one point, only 12 out
of a cohort of 84 National Merit Scholars graduated.”

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

The drama surrounding Kyle Washington, current student
engagement coordinator for the FAMU Office of Communications, hasn’t
been limited to cable television.

Articles by The FAMUan state that Washington urged the FAMU
Student Senate to impeach two Student Government Association (SGA) presidents
in the past.

Back in 2007, FAMUan reporter Latasha Edwardswrote that “Washington
told the senate he wanted to impeach Student Body President Phillip Agnew.”

“We need to impeach Philip Agnew for the basis on not doing
his job, not informing us on what's going on with the Board of Trustees and
administrators, violating state laws, purchasing contracts, and allowing our
administration to spend out of control as they have,” Washington was quoted as
saying in the article.

Agnew said “the accusations are unfounded and ridiculous.”
He added that Washington was of “no relevance in terms of impeachment.”

Monday, July 25, 2016

At the June 10, 2016 meeting of the FAMU Board of Trustees
(BOT), School of Business and Industry Professor Clyde Ashley told board
members about the possible targeting of four deans at the university.

Ashley didn’t go into details about what he meant when he said
the deans were “being targeted.” But the four deans he mentioned during his
two-minute speech in the public comments section of the meeting were School of
Architecture and Engineering Technology Dean Rodner B. Wright, SBI Dean Shawnta
Friday-Stroud, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean Michael D.
Thompson, and School of Journalism and Graphic Communication Dean Ann L. Wead
Kimbrough.

President Elmira Mangum didn’t comment on the issue at the
BOT meeting.

Monday, July 18, 2016

Back in Fall 1997, Florida A&M University had 10,998
students. That’s more than any historically black college or university (HBCU)
today. North Carolina A&T University (NCA&T) was the largest single campus HBCU in Fall 2015 with 10,852 students.

FAMU’s enrollment in Fall 2015 dropped to 9,920 (down from
10,233 in Fall 2014) under President Elmira Mangum. That cost FAMU $9M+ from
tuition and fee losses. FAMU expects to lose about another $10M due to its projected
loss of 920 students in 2016-2017.

Monday, June 27, 2016

The enrollment drop at FAMU didn’t start with President
Elmira Mangum. But the financial losses from the continued decline in students
have gotten worse since she’s been in office.

FAMU lost a total of $9.2M in tuition and fees because of
declining enrollment in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014.The university then took a hit of $9.2M due to the enrollment
decline in 2014-2015.

FAMU lost another $9M
because of the enrollment drop in 2015-2016, after Mangum had over a year to lead recruitment efforts. FAMU expects to lose more than $9M in
2016-2017 due to its projected loss of 920 students.

Some Mangum supporters are trying to blame the enrollment
decline on the negative news from the 2011 hazing death of Marching 100 drum major
Robert Champion. They appear to want people to forget how Mangum herself
responded to that assumption in 2014.

Monday, June 06, 2016

Back during the June 2015 meetings of the FAMU Board of
Trustees, then-Chairman Rufus Montgomery gave the Special Committee on
Governance a compilation of documents on issues that he thought needed to be
discussed as part of the annual evaluation process for President Elmira Mangum.

One of those documents was a copy of a June 2 email that
Vice-Chairman Kelvin Lawsonsent to Rufus, then-General Counsel Avery McKnight,
and BOT Liaison Linda Barge-Miles. The email was entitled: “Fwd: President
Mangum Letters of Support – Request” and contained two forwarded emails that
were sent from FAMU Alumni Affairs staffers to officers of the FAMU National
Alumni Association (NAA).

The first forwarded email was dated May 27 and was from
Brandon Hill, who then served as the FAMU coordinator of membership services
and alumni reunions. It was addressed to “NAA Leadership” and said that “Alumni
Affairs Assistant Vice President, Dr. John Lee has asked that we reach out to
all of our NAA Chapter Presidents to solicit letters of support for Dr. Elmira
Mangum and the outstanding work that she is doing at FAMU. We are told these
letters will be used in the President’s annual review. Dr. Lee kindly asks that
all letters be submitted via email by Friday, May 29, 2015 to our office.”

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Back in July of 2015, FAMU lost budget authority for the
FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE) after 28 years. FAMU President Elmira Mangum
supported the changes that led to this.

The next month, FAMU alumnus and former state Sen. Alfred
“Al” Lawson told a reporter that he had offered his help to Mangum a number of
times but she wasn’t interested in hearing what he had to say.

The News Service of Florida report stated that “Lawson said
Mangum doesn't trust anyone.”

“I told her I wanted her to be successful,” Lawson said in a
quote in the article. “I've been around for a long time, and I could keep her
from running into roadblocks. … I was not trying to be hired or anything. I did
that on three different occasions, and it did not work out.”

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Back in 2009,
Matthew Carter, II was denied reappointment to the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) amid reported suspicions
that the agency was inappropriately close to the private utility companies that
it had a duty to regulate.

Carter, who was the sitting PSC chairman at the time and was
seeking another term, had issued a press release weeks earlier saying he took “great
offense” at the suggestion that he and the other commissioners were “too cozy
with regulated industries, [Florida Power & Light Co.] in particular.”

Monday, January 25, 2016

On Oct. 21, FAMU Vice-President for Audit and Compliance
Rick Givens wrote the chairman of the Board of Trustees (BOT) to report
“potential interference with the work of Audit & Compliance.” Givens was in
the middle of looking into questions from the Florida
auditor general about spending on the campus President’s House when he received
an email from FAMU Vice-President for Finance and Administration Dale Cassidy
that led him to send that notice to the BOT.

This isn’t the first time that there have been suspicions of
administrative interference with the duties of the FAMU internal auditor.

Monday, January 18, 2016

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the Florida Board of
Governors (BOG) will hold a meeting at Florida State University. Three Florida A&M University Board of Trustees vacancies will be on the agenda.

The FAMU alumni in the Florida Legislature
have let the BOG run all over their alma mater since 2015. They are still silent in the aftermath of BOG-supported changes that led to FAMU losing control
of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE) budget after 28 years, BOG member
Norman Tripp talking to FAMU administrators in a condescending way, and FAMU’s
alumni being reduced to a minority in the 11 appointed university Board of
Trustees seats.

FAMU used to have much stronger alumni legislators like
Carrie P. Meek and Al Lawson who didn’t back down when the former Board of
Regents (BOR) did things that were harmful to the school.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Back in 2007, the FAMU Board of Trustees took action after
the interim president chose to go along with a change that was inconsistent
with a university policy.

FAMU’s policy for the past 28 years has been that it wants
to serve as the fiscal agent/budget manager of the FAMU-FSU College of
Engineering (COE). That was established by a 1987 agreement between FAMU and
FSU that received the approval of the Board of Regents, which was the
policy-making body for both of the universities at the time. The FAMU Board of
Trustees adopted that policy when the Florida law made it the new policy-making
body for the university in 2001.

But six years later, Interim President Castell V. Bryant
said she had no problem with a legislative plan to transfer the COE fiscal
agent/budget manager duties from FAMU to FSU. A Tallahassee Democrat article
from March 30, 2007 stated that “after discussing it with [FSU President T.K. Wetherell],
she said she was fine with the change.”

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Twelve years ago, FAMU had one of the best
financially-managed athletic departments among all the nation’s historically
black colleges and universities.

Ken Riley, who started serving as FAMU’s athletic director
in 1994, left the department with an estimated surplus of more than $3M when
he stepped down in 2002.

Roosevelt Wilson, who served as FAMU’s athletic director
from 1980 to 1985, called attention to the following facts in an editorial he
published in his Capital Outlook newspaper. It also ran in
the December 8-December 14, 2004 edition of the Miami Times:

Monday, April 14, 2014

Back in 1973, the Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) told the State of Florida that it was
still carrying out a separate-but-equal operation in its State University
System. Federal officials said that if the state didn’t begin complying in
honesty with Congressional laws that mandated the desegregation of higher
education, then Florida would lose $70M in federal money.

A St. Petersburg Timesarticle from 1973 reported that:
“Florida has until April 8 to submit a plan to replace one rejected Nov. 13 or
face the loss of about $70-million in federal funds, mostly research grants.”

If inflation is taken into account, that $70M from
1973 would be about $370M today.

The State of Florida avoided losing those tens of millions
of federal dollars by entering into a desegregation consent decree with the HEW
Civil Rights Office.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Last spring, Melvin T. Stithretired from the deanship of
the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University. Throughout his nine
years in that position, he brought in millions in new private donations and
grant dollars.

Stith’s huge success as a fundraiser and grant-raiser at
Syracuse was no surprise. Prior to becoming Whitman’s dean in 2005, he led the
Florida State University (FSU) College of Business for 13 years. According to
the Central New York Business Journal, “During his tenure [at FSU], Stith
increased the school's endowment from $8 million to $55 million, expanded the
number of endowed chairs to nine, built an all-wireless 12,000-square-foot
technology center, made the school a leader in graduating minority doctoral
candidates, and guided a $79.5 million fundraising campaign for the business
school.”

FAMU had a chance to hire Stith as its ninth president in
2002. A proud alumnus of Norfolk State University, Stith wanted to lead the
nation’s largest single campus historically black university. During his campus
interviews, he talked about his desire to use his connections in Wall Street to
help expand the FAMU endowment. He also wanted to build more research programs
at the university.

But Bill Jennings, chairman of the Board of Trustees presidential
search committee, and the board members who thought like him led the charge to deny
FAMU a Melvin Stith presidency.

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